Saturday, 28 September 2013

I
have quite a long piece in this week’s Radio
Times about the history of the magazine (it’s the 90th
anniversary issue). On 10 September 1923 John Reith, the BBC’s general manager,
wrote in his diary: ‘Everything is now in shape for a BBC magazine, and from
various alternatives I chose Radio Times for
the title.’ On the front cover of its first issue, Arthur Burrows, the BBC’s
Director of Programmes, wrote in brisk, not very Reithian style: ‘HULLO
EVERYONE! We will now give you the Radio
Times. The good new times. The
Bradshaw of Broadcasting. May you never be late for your wave-train. Speed
186,000 miles per second; five-hour non-stops. Family season ticket: First
Class, 10s. per year.’ The new magazine, in which the word ‘listeners’ was
enclosed throughout in inverted commas, arrived in newsagents on Friday 28
September 1923. It soon had an army of subscribers, the magazine being mailed
out to them each week from its Addressing Department by Great War veterans with
facial disfigurements – employed especially by Reith, a scarred veteran
himself.

For
the novelist Anthony Burgess, then a schoolboy called John Wilson living with
his parents above a tobacconist’s shop in a poor area of Moss Side, Manchester,
the Radio Times offered an entry
point to another world. It was, he recalled, ‘a substantial publication like a
weekly Blast, only better printed,
and all for twopence. Its tone was intellectual, its artwork highly
contemporary; it abounded with gratuitous erudition.’ Burgess had built his own
crystal radio set to hear Adrian Boult’s BBC Symphony Orchestra, and he relied
on the magazine to tell him when they were on.

But in his diary for 7 September 1963 the now 74-year-old
Lord Reith complained: ‘The vulgarity of the Radio Times week by week makes me sorry I ever started it.’

Saturday, 21 September 2013

Oliver
Cromwell famously said that he wanted his portrait to include “all these
roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything as you see me”. Nowadays we have little
choice in the matter. We live in an era in which our photographic likenesses circulate
ever more freely in the form of webcam images, profile pictures and mobile phone
snapshots, and they cannot all be flattering.

You
would think that, in this era of instantly available avatars of ourselves,
something as analogue as a painted portrait would have little purchase. But all
this week, viewers on The One Show are voting on which public figure should be
the subject of a “People’s Portrait” in the National Portrait Gallery. And last
week there was much interest in the artist Grahame Hurd-Wood, who aims to paint
a portrait of every person in his home city of St Davids. He thinks it will
take him at least another five years to reproduce all 1800 residents – a task
that could be done with a camera in a day.

The
painted portrait has outlived most of its original purposes. Before photography,
it was the main way of preserving someone’s image beyond their own lifetime. It
was also largely the preserve of the rich and well-connected, a way of
announcing wealth, status and ancestral lineage. None of these advantages
applies in the new age of the “selfie”, the self-portrait taken with
front-facing phone camera.

But
a painted portrait can still be extraordinarily compelling. For it can show us
that we are not, as Shakespeare wrote and most of us think we are, the lords
and owners of our faces. Before allowing ourselves to be photographed, we subconsciously
flinch and arrange our features in such a way as to give a poor sense of how we
usually look. The artist Graham Sutherland once said that “only those totally
without physical vanity, educated in painting, or with exceptionally good
manners, can disguise their feelings of shock or even revulsion when they are
confronted for the first time with a reasonably truthful painted image of
themselves”. Anyone who has been horrified at encountering their glum, ill-prepared
countenance unexpectedly in a shop window will know what he means.

Just
as a selfie is only one version of the self – for most people do not view us completely
face-on, grinning inanely, at arm’s length – a painted portrait is a reinvention
of another person. Many portrait painters make the head bigger than it really
is, because it is what we notice first in others. The eyes may be enlarged for
the same reason, while the ears, which most of us barely register unless they
are especially protuberant, are usually an afterthought. A portrait painter is
trying to capture a person’s ineffable essence rather than a mirror image. As
Picasso said of his portrait of Gertrude Stein, “everybody says that she does not look like it, but that does not
make any difference. She will.”

No
one, after all, has just one face; it changes constantly according to such
variables as angle of view, mood, lighting and the ageing process. Compared to those
of other species, human faces are very different from each other, and, since we
have more separate muscles in our faces than any other animal, uniquely expressive.
And yet every human face, for all that it is as idiosyncratic as a fingerprint, also seems fundamentally familiar. In old paintings, it is
always the face – rather than the historically distancing aspects of hairstyle,
costume and decor - which conveys the sense that the person portrayed is
someone recognisable who could step out of the painting into the present.

I still recall my shock at first seeing
the face of Tollund Man, the mummified body discovered in a Danish peat bog in
1950 - a mild, unremarkable face you might just as easily have come across attached
to a stranger on the bus. The selfie has become ubiquitous not because we live in an
unusually narcissistic age, but because we first connect with other human
beings through their faces. And that is also
why a painted portrait has the power to move us still.

Sunday, 15 September 2013

British Library
Publishing sent me a copy of a book they have just republished. You Have
Been Warned! A Complete Guide to Road was first published in 1935, co-authored
by the British Punch cartoonist
Fougasse (real name Kenneth Bird, now best known for those wartime ‘Careless
talk costs lives’ posters) and Donald McCullough (later to become the avuncular
chairman of the BBC’s Brains Trust). A runaway bestseller, it was a comic
anthropology of the eccentric behaviour of road users. Fougasse’s cartoon of a
driver stretching out his right arm, for instance, was translated as ‘I am
going to turn to my right,’ ‘I am going to shake the ash off my cigarette,’ and
‘the house over there with the green door is where our cook’s mother lives’. A wonderfully vague hand signal was translated as ‘‘I am going to TURN to
the LEFT or the RIGHT or SLOW down or SKID or STOP or maybe DASH across and ask
the WAY from the policeman on POINT duty.’

The book had a semi-official
sanction, being published with funds from the National Safety First
Association. Scarier safety propaganda was regarded as rather shouty and
unEnglish, the kind of in-your-face activity with which the Nazis, who
pioneered the national road safety campaign, were associated. Propaganda that
focused on the potential for accidents, advised one psychologist, would ‘only
produce a dangerous fear in the nervous and timid and would be no deterrent to
the exhibitionist’. You Have Been Warned called
the new Highway Code ‘the Road-User’s Statute of Liberty and Magna Carta of the
Road’.

For a book published
nearly 80 years ago, the humour stands up very well – as well, I would
say, as another humour classic from the 1930s: Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That.

About Me

I am a writer and academic, based at Liverpool John Moores University. I have written five books, the most recent of which are Queuing for Beginners (2007), a cultural history of daily habits since the war, inspired in part by the Mass-Observation surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009). As well as publishing articles in obscure academic journals, I write for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Financial Times and other publications. I am a cultural historian focusing on the very recent past, with a particular interest in the everyday. To email me, click on 'view my complete profile' below. You can follow me on Twitter at
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